Unseen Mystery
by WornOutDreamer
Summary: Tanaka Yui is a first generation Quirk user with the ability to sense and manipulate the energy that powers Quirks. Feeling she gained this power for a reason she aims for UA, to become a hero and perhaps even discover the origin of Quirks. To some, however, her powers make her a target, and for a few others, her goals threaten to unearth answers they want buried permanently. OC.
1. Chapter 1

Recollections: Chapter 1

I had just turned four years old when one of my classmates, Daichi, manifested his Quirk. It turned the tips of his fingers into drills, and everyone oohed and ahhed over it while he figured out how it worked. The teachers smiled at him and told him how great of a Quirk he had, while I grew curious. "Sensei," I asked, "why do people get the Quirks they get?"

One of the teachers turned to me, still smiling and said, "Well, Yui-chan, it's pretty simple. People either get one of their parents Quirks or they get one that's a combination of the two. Does that make sense?"

I felt an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach after she told me that. I looked around grasping for something to say to fill the silence, when I said, "Th-then… What are Daichi-kun's parents' Quirks?"

She seemed surprised by the question, and honestly, I didn't know why I asked it either. But her expression turned contemplative, and she looked up, concentrating.

"Hmm… If I remember correctly, then his mother's Quirk lets her spin all her fingers around in place, and his father, I believe, can move earth around quite easily with his hands."

She nodded as if satisfied with her answer, before looking back at me. "Does that answer your question?" she asked.

I bobbed my head up and down.

Later that day, after Dad got home from work, we ate dinner. I told them about what my teacher had told me and asked, "Does that mean that I won't get a Quirk?"

My parents looked at each other, their faces unreadable, then turned back to me. Dad started talking, with a slow, quiet voice, "Well, sweetie, you know that both your mom and I are Quirkless."

"Not that there's anything wrong with that," Mom injected sternly.

Dad nodded at that before continuing, "No, nothing wrong with it at all. But that means that it's very unlikely for you to have a Quirk of your own."

I looked between the two of them, not understanding. "But… everyone else will have a Quirk."

Dad looked a little lost for words, but Mom just pursed her lips and said, "Yui, twenty percent of humanity is Quirkless. We're a minority, but there's still almost two billion people who don't have Quirks."

My face felt wet. "B-but those are all old people!" I shouted.

Mom looked pained. "I'm sorry Yui, but there are some things in life you can't change."

I never noticed when Dad climbed out of his chair and started hugging me nor when Mom stood up and started petting my head. But even though I felt safe and the smell of Dad's shirt comforted me, it didn't get rid of the lingering anxiety in my chest.

I was almost five when I manifested my own Quirk. Class had just started and the teachers started showing everyone how to play a word game. At first, I just felt a small sensation in my chest, like a little light that I could see without my eyes.

And then I saw everything. The little not-light in my chest got drowned out by the mass of sensation flooding my mind. The kids and teachers around me, the man walking his dog just outside the preschool, the people buying food at the grocery store down the street, the ants crawling up a wall three blocks away. Past that things got blurry, but even within that range, nothing made sense. The not-lights twisted and shook in ways that couldn't happen, inside and around people in unique patterns, flattening and calming as it moved away, but still everywhere I saw/felt/sensed it. In the ground, in the water, and even in the air itself. It filled my lungs, choking me.

I heard words around me but for some reason they sounded muffled. Distracting. I moved in deeper, focusing on the not-lights in the center of the ball that I _knew_. Solid not-lights fluttered to and fro, shuffling weak and still forming not-lights away from the center. One of the solid not-lights came and the center moved shifting my point of view, stopping in a place not that far away, but felt soft. I felt a not-light come from beyond and move quickly towards the center. Like a few others, it felt flat, no twists or shakes, yet still bright. It lingered for a while before taking the center and moving it somewhere far away, yet somehow familiar. Calming. Adrift in the calm ocean of unseen light, I fell inward. Further and further away from the rest of the world, until all that remained was inky darkness.

Time didn't seem to have any meaning. Seconds felt like minutes felt like hours. Muffled voices drifted down from on high. They came and went but they could never quite reach me. The two I heard the most often tickled something in the back of my mind. Like I should know them somehow. At first, they sounded stressed, yet hopeful, but after days felt like months felt like years they sounded somehow… sad. Desperate. Scared. For the first time since falling I reached back, trying to catch those muted sounds and I heard. _Hospital_, _Quirk, month, coma_. Words without context and I struggled to understand, to _comprehend_ until…

I opened my eyes.

I saw, actually saw this time, a grid of large white tiles filling my vision. I heard a sharp gasp beside me and, slowly, I turned to see Mom. Her light brown hair looked like it hadn't been brushed for days, and she had large dark circles underneath her tired brown eyes.

"Oh, sweetie…"

The book she had in her now limp hands dropped to the floor as she carefully wrapped her arms around me. Through the tight hug I could feel her shaking and the wet tears that fell on my shoulder. And yet still beneath it all I could feel that flat, white not-light inside her calm in relief.

What felt like hours passed with her arms around me, one comforting hand stroking my hair.

Eventually a doctor came in, a young man with small, white horns on his forehead, and explained to me that I was in the hospital. Apparently I had fallen in class and wasn't responsive, so they called my parents, thinking that it might be do to sensory overload of my Quirk manifesting. Mom had taken me home to rest, but shortly after I fell into a coma.

After he finished explaining they did a bunch of tests to make sure I was all right and then the doctor showed me an x-ray of my foot. He pointed out the lack of a second pinky toe joint, saying it meant I had a Quirk.

"Although your case is a bit extreme, children who manifest Quirks that give them enhanced or additional senses often experience sensory overload and pass out until their brains have time to adjust. We believe that this is what happened to you. Can you describe any differences you feel?" he asked.

I tried to put it into words, I really did. I talked about how the not-light had something like color, but wasn't actually color, his being something I'd liken to yellow. About the twists and shakes that couldn't happen that formed balls in people's chests. About how my mom's was white and flat, but not actually. The doctor appeared confused at a lot of points and by the end I was pretty frustrated. He still seemed impressed by it though. "Amazing! To be able to sense and differentiate people from so far away is simply an amazing Quirk! I'm sure that you could easily become a great hero!"

Mom's expression remained still after that. The next day they let me go home, which I enjoyed. The same house I grew up in now seemed new and exciting. I could sense the pipes and wiring behind the walls and where pretty much everything around the house was at all times. Living things were the easiest to sense, but the not-light was everywhere, so I could sense objects through the outline they made. The range that I had before seemed to be a one time thing. If I concentrated I could bring it out to about a one block radius, but most of the time it just barely touched the other houses around us.

A few days after that though, I had to go back to school. I'd like to say that when I got back all my friends came up to greet me, but the truth was that I wasn't really close to anyone. I talked to people, and they all oohed and ahhed when I closed my eyes and pointed out unerringly where everyone stood. But after the all excitement died down, and the teachers got back to class, they all went back to hanging out with their own friends.

It was at about that time that I figured out what the not-light really was. We were playing around outside when Daichi, the kid with the drill fingers, and a couple of other boys started digging around in the dirt. My sight and my Quirk overlapped a little bit. Looking at something helped me focus on the finer details of what I sensed. Which is why I was staring at Daichi, or rather, at the ball of light brown not-light in his chest. I saw how little tendrils of the stuff went down his arm and into his fingers, which had their own small, not-light structures. How those structures soaked the ground in front of them with shaking, spinning pools of not-light. And how those pools let him move far more dirt than those tiny drills of his really should be able to move.

_Oh_, I realized, _they're Quirks._

I stared at people after that. A lot. Sometimes I did it just to admire how pretty their Quirks were, but mostly it was to figure out how they worked. Which I did. Just… very slowly. Often times, when my family walked around outside I'd stop to ask people if I could see them use their Quirks. Most people said no, apologised, and walked away, but sometimes their expressions would soften, they'd look around, then show me. Very rarely, my parents stopped to let me see hero fights. From a safe distance of course, which annoyed me a bit. I always had to concentrate to extend my range, so I could never quite focus solely on how the heroes' and villains' Quirks worked. Still, I always walked away having learned something new.

Unfortunately though, this habit really didn't endear me to my classmates. The opposite, in fact. I already didn't really have any friends, and now I spent my over half my time just staring at them. Whenever the teachers turned their backs, the others kids called me things like 'creepy' or 'freak', and in one memorable case a girl said I looked like 'a cow about to get hit by a car'. It hurt. Thinking back, I could kind of see where they were coming from, but that didn't make it hurt any less.

It made me miserable, their taunts. The fact that they never let me play with them. The teachers tried to help, to make them include me. But I'd just look at the expressions on the other kids' faces, feel something twist unpleasantly in my stomach, and say that I prefered to just watch.

I didn't stop, though.

I couldn't help it. I had become far too curious for something like that to dissuade me. Plus, I always had my parents there to support me. They usually looked confused when I explained how I found the same not-light structures in different Quirks, or how two Quirks that looked practically the same through mundane senses, actually worked completely differently beneath the surface. Mostly because my vocabulary was childish, and I often made up terms completely on the spot. But still, smiles would tug at the corners of their lips, and they'd nod every now and again as if they could understand the nonsense coming out of my mouth.

Eventually, after being in preschool for what seemed like far too long, we moved up into kindergarten. The first day of class, I tried as hard as I could to not stare at anyone for too long, and I succeeded.

For the most part.

But when playtime came around, and I started nervously looking around for people to talk to, I found that everyone had already formed into little groups. No one even looked at me… except for one girl. She had a round face and large brown eyes. Her short hair curled in a bit at the bottom and was a rich brown color, just a shade darker than my own flat hair. She must have noticed the look on my face because she smiled at me and beckoned me over.

A warm feeling lifted up in my chest, but… I looked warily over at the other girls in her group. Two of them used to be in my old class. I uselessly hoped they wouldn't recognize me, but when they followed the gaze of the brown-haired girl, they sneered at me. One of them turned to the girl and said something, glancing over at me every now and again.

The girl turned to them, and as time went on her hands clenched and the face that smiled at me became something disapproving. I looked down, eyes threatening to spill over, the once warm feeling in my chest turning cold and biting. I could sense the girl walking over to me. _Probably to call me a freak_, I thought.

She stopped a couple feet away and I heard her say, "Hi! My name's Ochako! What's your name?"

I froze at the happy tone of her voice. I looked up slowly, expecting that same sneer on her face, but what I received instead was a brilliant smile. The tightness around my heart lessened, and I had to fight to keep the tears in. I managed to squeak out, "Yui. Tanaka Yui."

"Ah, Yui-chan then!" She stuck her hand out, pinky held away from the others. "Do you want to be friends?"

Hic. "Yes!" I cried.

Literally.

"You're crying?! Wait, no! Don't cry!"

Fat tears dripped down my face as Ochako became worried, her hands hovering awkwardly around me. "Are you okay? What's wrong?!" she asked.

"I-I'm sorry… It's just…" Hic. "I'm really happy…"

Through my blurry vision, I couldn't make out what kind expression of Ochako made, but the way she wrapped her arms around me said enough.


	2. Chapter 2

Recollections: Chapter Two

After sniffling for a bit and assuring our teacher that I was fine, I pulled my face away from her shoulder. "Sorry…" Sniff. "about crying on your shirt."

"That's okay! I don't mind!" Ochako assured me.

I glanced over at the two girls I knew from class. They were pointing over at us and snickering, and I think I could hear them say something like 'crybaby'. Ochako must have heard too because her mouth pressed into a thin line as she looked back towards the group she came from.

I looked down.

She leaned over to me and whispered, "Ignore them, they dunno what they're talking about."

"...They do though. Probably said I'm creepy and stare at people all the time. They're right, though, I _do_ do that."

Ochako hesitated and carefully said, "How come? My parents say it's rude to stare at people."

"I know… I just… can't help it. Cause of my Quirk."

"Oh! That's fine then! My parents always say 'we should respect each other's differences'," she said, sounding out the last word deliberately.

Sniff. "What's that mean?"

She faltered for a moment, before pushing on, raising a fist in the air and shouting, "Don't be mean to each other."

It startled a giggle out of me. She flashed a quick smile at me, before asking, "So what is it then?"

I cocked my head to the side. "Huh?"

"You said your Quirk made you stare at things, right? So, what is it?"

"Oh! Well, um…"

I paused for a moment, trying to remember the simplified explanation I made, then continued, "I can sense this… energy stuff… that's all around us. Normally I can't sense that far, but if I concentrate I can make it bigger. Umm, what else? Oh, yeah! This energy stuff makes up Quirks!"

Ochako blinked.

"Makes up Quirks?" she asked.

"Uh, yeah… Everyone with a Quirk has this little ball of energy in them, and the ball actually is their Quirk, and well… the reason I stare at people is because I want to know how they work."

Ochako paused for a moment, but then she looked contemplative. "So, can you tell how my Quirk works?"

"Umm, well…"

I looked down into her chest, then down her arms, and immediately said, "Your Quirk works through your fingers."

Her eyes lit up, while her mouth hung open. "You're right! That's amazing! What else can you tell?"

"Uhh," I put eloquently.

I stared at her hands. Quirks that only activated if all five fingers touched the same target were quite common in the grand scheme of things, so that information wasn't all that impressive. I looked deeper, not even noticing that I had grabbed her hand until I'd already brought it closer to my face. I traced the structures and lines of not-light, until I came to a realization.

"Your Quirk activates when all five of your fingers touch something… and if you bring all of your fingers together then… something else happens…"

At that point I realized what I had done with her hand and pulled my own back like it had been burned, stuttering out an apology.

She didn't seem to have heard me, instead saying, "That's so cool, Yui-chan! If you became a hero, you could, like, figure out a villains Quirk in an instant and know exactly how to take them down!"

I scratched the back of my head, "Y-you think?"

"Totally!"

A small smile grew on my lips and I asked, "So, um, what does your Quirk actually do? I mean, I get how it activates, but that's it."

"Oh right! Here, look," she said as she ran over to her bag and pulled out a book.

She held her pinkies away from it, until she ran back over to me, pushed the book out in front of her, and brought them down.

She let go.

And yet the book remained still, floating gently in the air.

I stared, like it was the most interesting thing in the world. And at that moment, it was. The instant all her fingers touched the book, a veritable flood of tiny, pink, finer-than-powder grains of twisted not-light streamed from the ball in her chest, down her arms and into the book, almost too fast to process. Her Quirk packed it to the brim with these particles, which now seemed almost fixed in place. Quickly, I noticed something that made me pause.

The particles weren't holding the book up. I mean, they were, just… not directly. I gazed deeper into the book, trying to focus on a single not-light grain, and for a just second it felt like I could sense… something. Nothing tangible, just a tiny difference between the area around the book and the one within it. Like the particles had made something in the area… flatter… but not flatter. Not the not-light, though. No… something intertwined with it or maybe… just so close, that it felt like they were in the same place. Close. I was so close. To understanding or some great discover, I didn't know. All I knew, was the desire, the _need_, to dive deeper into my sense. To block out every external stimuli. To _know_.

And then the particles dispersed into nothingness.

I did not yelp. And I most certainly did not jump back and trip over my own feet.

That would have been silly.

I glanced around trying to figure out what happened, when I saw Ochako looking at me guiltily, next to an amused teacher. "What's going on?" I asked.

He crouched down in front of me and said, "I'm sorry Yui-chan, but playtime is over for now, alright?"

I blinked. "But… I thought it was supposed to be an hour."

The corners of his mouth twitched up. "Yui-chan, you've been staring at that book for over thirty minutes."

I felt my face heat up, barely squeaking out, "W-what?!"

"Why didn't you snap me out of it?!" I asked, turning to Ochako.

"Well," she said, " you looked like you were having fun, so I didn't want to stop you. I tried taking the book away once, but your hands shot out and grabbed it."

She mimed the movement, while my face grew even hotter. Ochako shrugged. "So I just started coloring next to you instead. I only released the book when Yamamori-sensei asked me to," she finished, pointing at the teacher.

"Shifting the blame, Ochako-chan, I'm hurt," he said, clutching his hand to his chest dramatically.

She giggled.

He ended up herding us together with the rest of the students so he could teach us all the basics of addition. I enjoyed it, but a lot the other kids seemed confused.

At the end of the day, when my Mom came to pick me up, Ochako waved her arm at me, with a big smile on her face, saying, "Bye Yui-chan! See you tomorrow!"

And a weight in my chest that I didn't even know was there fell away. I waved back, my own smile in place as I said, "Y-yeah! See you tomorrow, Ochako-chan."

"Alright, it's time to go now Yui," said the gentle voice of my mother.

I looked up at her, and saw her smiling down at me, eyes crinkled. As she grabbed my hand and we started walking home, I noticed that, for some reason, the tension that she always used to have whenever she came to pick me up was absent.

* * *

Since that day, Ochako and I hung out whenever we had the chance, and our parents started setting up playdates for us all the time. We played games together, watched TV, talked about our favorite heroes, and whenever she gave me the chance, I would babble at her about whatever Quirk had caught my attention that day.

In school, when she went around playing games with everyone, she'd drag me along with her like I was a particularly stubborn puppy. She didn't seem to mind that, however. In fact, even though it looked like she got along well with just about everyone, she chose to spend most of her time with me.

Everyone liked Ochako. She was one of the kids that started up games of Heroes and Villains, and the one you always went to if you had a problem. Whenever someone got a new haircut, or bracelet, or skinned knee, she'd be the first to notice and ask about it. Her bubbly personality and the way that she always got super competitive in sports even let her get along really well with the boys.

I, on the other hand, chattered at her so often that I'm pretty sure she actually got close to understanding most of what I talked about, and I repeatedly got distracted when talking to her, forcing her to repeat things over and over again. Quite regularly, I had her use her Quirk on things and then proceeded to stand around unresponsive for the majority of the hour, tracing the lines and paths of the tiny granules of not-light with my eyes. And yet, for whatever reason, she liked me.

So even though our classmates saw me as that weird kid that stares at people all the time and would rather not interact with me, they never left me out of games or made fun of me. Not to my face at least.

I always left school smiling from ear to ear.

One day, when class had ended and we were waiting for our parents, Ochako asked me a question. "Hey, Yui-chan, what's your Quirk called?"

"My Quirk? Umm…"

I thought back, trying to remember the name that the Quirk Registry people decided on.

"I think they ended up calling it… Area Sense or something like that," I said.

"Eh?" Ochako said, eyes widening, "I thought that you sensed Quirks, though."

"I-I can do both," I defended.

"Well, yeah, but it doesn't really fit, you know?"

"No… you're right, it doesn't," I admitted, looking down. "When they asked me if I was okay with the name, I didn't really understand my Quirk that well, so I just said yes."

"Ahh, that makes sense," Ochako said, with a sympathetic look on her face.

There was a brief lull in the conversation, before I asked, "What about you? What's your Quirk called?"

"Oh! It's called Zero Gravity!"

I cocked my head to the side. I'd heard of Quirks that controlled gravity before, but didn't actually know what it was. "That sounds cool," I said.

She grinned at me.

* * *

Later that day, after dinner, I said, "Hey, Daddy?"

"Hmm?" He turned away from his book and looked at me. "What is it, kiddo?"

"What's gravity?"

"Ah, well, you see, gravity is what makes things fall to the ground. It's the reason why we don't all float off into space," he said, nodding sagely.

"Oh, okay. What is it though? Like… how does it work?"

He opened his mouth for a moment, then closed it, rubbing his chin. "Huh. Well, I can't say I know too much about the details." He paused for a moment, thinking. "Why don't we look it up together?" he suggested.

"Okay!"

We watched a few videos on the subject on our computer, and suddenly everything about Ochako's Quirk made a lot more sense. That weird flat-not-flat feeling I sensed next to the not-light whenever I examined her Quirk must have been space itself, smoothing out. I wondered for a moment how much more I could understand about Quirks if I learned more science.

And so, almost every day after that, whenever I found an interesting quirk, I would ask my parents about it or look up things up online on how the science behind it worked. I learned about atoms, combustion, electricity, energy, Quirk factors, biology, PH values, you name it. If it had anything to do with a Quirk, I wanted to know about it. Things got to the point where my parents ended up buying me textbooks just to keep me occupied. It went slowly at first though. I always had to keep a dictionary on hand just to look up the words I couldn't figure out.

For a while I simply passed my time like that. Over the next few years, my explanations to Ochako became more and more detailed, so a lot of times, I had to stop to explain what certain things meant. She seemed happy to learn, though, and after a while she started coming to me to ask how I thought her favorite Pro Heroes' Quirks worked, offering her own thoughts every now and again.

Around third grade, however, things started getting a bit more complicated. Our Quirk counseling sessions had started last year so the teachers became a lot stricter about us not using our Quirks in school, and they took the lessons more seriously. So whenever I stared at someone for too long, or got distracted and didn't hear them call on me, I got scolded.

Which happened a lot.

Especially in our literature classes, because I always got really bored during those. Nothing against the subject, but it didn't really align with many of my interests. Sometimes though, it seemed like the teacher took it personally, and I thought I could even hear him mutter unkind words under his breath, although never quite loudly enough to discern.

The only exception was science class. I loved learning how to set up experiments and about the scientific method, and our teacher could sense my enthusiasm. Every now and again, however, we learned things that I'd already looked into, and she got a little frustrated if I didn't pay attention. But once I explained that I already knew the material, she started having me write a report on the next day's subject. If she found that I really did understand it, she let do my own thing in class, as long as I participated in the experiments.

Still though, for the most part, the teachers didn't seem to like me, and the other kids in our grade picked up on that. For them, it was practically written permission to start bullying me again. Even the fact that Ochako and I were friends didn't appear to stop them.

All it really did was drag her down with me.

They didn't actually bully her, just… whenever they wouldn't let me play with them, she refused to play either. When others ignored me, then she ignored them. It isolated her. During school, she always seemed a little bit less bright than the day before.

It felt wrong.

Ochako was the most amazing person I had ever met. So once I saw some of her other friends turn away from her and pretend like she didn't exist, I decided.

One afternoon, as we quietly walked our way home from school and made it to the fork in the road where we parted ways, I stopped.

She continued on for a few steps before noticing, turning back to me. "What's up?" she asked, looking confused.

The lump in my throat felt impossibly large, but I somehow managed to keep the words that came out of my mouth level when I said, "Uraraka-san, I don't want to be friends with you anymore."

The look of betrayal on her face almost broke me.

Almost.

"W-what? Why?!"

Tears quickly filled her eyes and trailed down her round, rosy cheeks.

My chest felt numb, even as the icy grip around my heart tightened. "It has become clear to me that you can't keep up with my intelligence. Someone like you will only hold me back."

The words sounded hollow in my ears. She couldn't know the real reason. She wouldn't accept the real reason.

Not waiting for her to respond, I turned away.

Just before making my way down the lonely path to my house, I said, "Goodbye, Uraraka-san."

But I couldn't stop the tiny crack in my voice at the very end. I started running, the tears I held back finally starting to make their way down my face.

And that was when she tackled me.

"G-get…" Hic. "Get off," I cried, trying to push her away from me.

Her grip tightened around my shirt like a vice. "No! Y-you…" Sniff. "You don't… I refuse!"

"I-I… I already tol-told you…" Hic. "I don't… don't…" Hic. "Don't want to be frien-en-ends!"

Shuddering gasps rocked my body as I futilely tried to keep the tears in, unable to even attempt to resist anymore.

Ochako's tears paused for a moment as she looked at me. A tiny snort left her lips. "You…" Sniff. "You say that…" Sniff. "But you're crying even more than me!"

She pulled me up to my knees, arms tight around my shoulders.

My hands grasped feebly to the front of her shirt, as I once again sobbed into her shoulder.

"Yui-chan…" Sniff. "You're my best friend… but sometimes… you're just so dense!"

_Best friend?_

I tried to stutter out an apology, but couldn't tell if she even heard it through the tears.

She continued, "I know you…" Sniff. "You did this because… because you thought that I could go back to playing with everyone else, if you weren't there… right?

A small, barely perceptible nod of my head answered her.

"It hurts… to not play and be friends with everyone, but…" Sniff. "I'd rather only have one friend, than for you to have none."

I tried to say something, anything, but my voice wouldn't come out. I let go of my grip on her shirt, my unsteady hands reaching for her shoulders. Shakily, I pushed her away, just enough to let me see her face.

She looked concerned, eyes full of tears, and… maybe a little bit scared too. I finally managed to squeeze just one word past my lips.

"Why?"

Her eyes widened, and she opened her mouth to say something, but I shook my head. I needed to ask this.

I took a deep, quivering breath before continuing, "Why do you even like me? I… I'm not… normal… I creep people out. I only ever talk about Quirks… Sometimes… Sometimes I ignore you when you're trying to talk to me… so…" Hic. "So why are you friends with me?!

I cast my eyes down to the rough concrete of the sidewalk. "I'm not… I'm not worth it."

Idly, I noticed my shirt floating gently around me, freed from the constraints of gravity.

Silence reigned over us, only broken by the occasional chirp of a bird or the rush of a passing car.

Only after my tears had dried and what felt like hours passed, did I hear Ochako's voice sound from in front of me. "There are times when the way you look at people is a bit unsettling… And sometimes, I get annoyed when you don't listen to me."

My vision blurred.

"But," she continued, "I think that the way you act when you talk about a really cool Quirk, and how excited you are about learning everything you can is the coolest thing about you!

I felt my jaw drop down, and I jolted my head up to look at her. Red lines rimmed her eyes, and tear tracks trailed down her face.

But her lips curved upwards, smiling at me.

"Most people might not see it, but you have a passion that you really love, and you don't let what others think stop you from doing it. I think… that that's the most amazing thing a person can do."

Tears fell from my eyes, but the weight pressing down on me had lessened. "You… you really mean that?" I asked.

Her smile turned a somewhat wry, and she glanced off to the side. "Well… It'd probably be even better if you could do it _without_ the staring."

I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry at that.

So I did a bit of both.

Her expression turned apologetic, before firming up once again. "But… yeah. I really do mean that." She stood up and offered me her hand. "Besides, I'm going to be a hero one day! What kind of hero abandons their friends when they need help?"

I looked at Ochako like this was the first time I'd ever seen her. Everyone always talked about becoming a hero when they grew up, but hardly anyone actually thought they would. Ochako, though, she really meant it. And at that moment, as I looked up at her determined expression with awe in my eyes, it felt like I could see a glimpse of her future. Saving others from villains and natural disasters, gently calming people down with her presence alone. I couldn't stop the words that came blurting out of my mouth next, even if I'd wanted to.

"Then I'll help you too! I'll… I'll stop staring at people, so… so you don't have to choose between friends! And… I'll help you figure out the best way to use your Quirk! So you can be the best hero you can be… I'll help you, so…" Hic. "So you can be proud that I'm your friend!"

I reached out for Ochako's hand as I forced myself not to cry. To be strong, like her. As she pulled me up and into a tight hug, I somehow managed to keep it together. "Thank you," she said, "but… I already am proud of you."

And that was when my second breakdown of the afternoon started.


End file.
